Silicon Valley threw a hot robot party, and the clankers were M.I.A.

At a sold-out convention successful San Francisco for group who build robots, the robots were amazingly difficult to find.

This week, 1,500 robotics investors, founders, and engineers packed a cavernous erstwhile Army storage astatine Fort Mason, overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. They came from crossed the state for Actuate, a convention that bills itself arsenic a mediate crushed betwixt an world gathering and a waste and acquisition show.

A fewer years ago, a crowd that size would person been difficult to imagine. For overmuch of the past 2 decades, robotics was a difficult waste successful Silicon Valley. Now it's 1 of tech's hottest bets, arsenic investors look beyond package for the next activity of AI.

Actuate's ain maturation mirrors the industry's reversal successful fortune. Its inaugural arena successful 2024 drew astir 250 people. A twelvemonth later, 500 group attended. This year, attendance tripled. Adrian Macneil, cofounder and CEO of Foxglove, the startup that organizes the conference, said they could person sold complete 2,000 tickets if the venue had space.

"For astir of the past 2 decades, robotics was seen arsenic an unsuccessful money pit by VCs," Macneil said successful his opening remarks. Now, money is pouring in. Robotics startups raised a grounds $15 cardinal globally successful 2025, according to Crunchbase, and different $18.8 cardinal truthful acold this year.

"Physical AI" — erstwhile a fringe term, now ubiquitous shorthand for machines that tin comprehend and enactment successful the existent world — was everywhere, from keynote speeches to cocktail-hour chatter.

Beneath the exuberance loomed the industry's cardinal constraint: As money and talent move in, hardware remains scarce. I spotted a fewer robot dogs doing backflips astatine a booth connected my measurement in, and caught a glimpse of Abi, Andromeda's multicolored companion humanoid, blowing bubbles into the assemblage during CEO Grace Brown's talk. Otherwise, it was slim pickings.

"Hardware is the missing piece," Theophile Gervet, cofounder and president of Genesis AI, which builds a general-purpose robot called Eno, told maine astatine the conference. "There's little hardware being built than what the manufacture needs."

At Actuate, information vendors outnumbered robots

That spread was particularly visible successful the conference's expo hall, wherever information vendors outnumbered hardware companies and sounded their services to an manufacture scrambling for the real-world information needed to train robot "brains." Uber AI Solutions sounded its world web for collecting and labeling AI training data, while Instawork showcased its caller wearable camera strategy that lets gig workers cod real-world information for robots.

Unlike AI chatbots, which were trained connected immense amounts of net data, nary comparable trove of physical-world information exists to thatch robots really to move done and interact pinch the existent world.

"It's conscionable an absolute feeding frenzy correct now, of group producing each sorts of data, of group buying each sorts of data," Macneil, a erstwhile Coinbase and Cruise executive, told Business Insider. His company, Foxglove, builds package that helps robotics companies analyse information from their machines and amended performance.

One panel, fittingly titled "The Data Wars," brought researchers from Nvidia, Physical Intelligence, and Generalist, among others, to statement what kinds of training information robots request and really to get it.

Robotics leaders worried astir FCC restrictions

The hardware shortage has taken connected caller urgency since the Federal Communications Commission imposed restrictions connected caller foreign-made "advanced robotic devices" past month. US manufacturers person welcomed protection from subsidized Chinese rivals, while startups and researchers opportunity that losing entree to inexpensive Chinese hardware could time off the state further behind.

The move became 1 of the biggest topics of speech astatine the conference. Chinese companies accounted for astir 90% of world shipments of humanoid robots past year.

"The FCC's regularisation is simply a spot of a problem," Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google's self-driving car task that later became Waymo, said during his astonishment keynote. Then, successful a fitting motion of the times, he revealed that he is moving connected a caller robotics startup, Dulo.

Fred Parietti, CEO of Multiply Labs, said he had anticipated the US and China decoupling and built overmuch of his company's proviso concatenation successful Europe. His company, which builds robotics systems for manufacturing compartment and cistron therapies, still relies connected Chinese humanoids to load and unload instrumentality without introducing contamination.

"There is nary replacement correct now," Parietti told Business Insider.

Chinese robots from Unitree took halfway stage

None of that dampened the mood. New graduates and young engineers, who mightiness person chased cushy Big Tech jobs successful different era, packed the convention halls. Loud popular euphony thumped from the morning, and cocktails flowed by early afternoon. For each 1 woman, location were 10 men.

The exuberance spilled into the night. At The Interval, a barroom tally by a nonprofit devoted to "long-term thinking" that counts Amazon laminitis Jeff Bezos and Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison among its donors, robotics veterans for illustration Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley professor, and Rodney Brooks, the laminitis of iRobot, mingled pinch Ph.D. dropouts starting companies.

Next doorway astatine German brew hallway Radhaus, a statement snaked retired the doorway for an Nvidia-sponsored soirée. On the past evening, DJ Umami, the resident DJ for the San Francisco Giants, closed retired the convention pinch a set.

At 1 moment, robots took halfway shape — though they, too, came from China. As the Chinese humanoid shaper Unitree went nationalist and its shares soared much than 600%, 2 of its humanoids — 1 red, 1 blue, some wearing fluorescent wigs — entered a mini ringing successful the main hallway for Robot Fight Night. Attendees controlled them remotely arsenic drinks flowed from an unfastened bar.

"Taste the knuckles of AI coming astatine your chin," the commentator shouted.

I only saw a fewer moments of existent interaction during the bot-versus-bot matches. More often, the robots punched bladed aerial aliases ended up facing distant from each other.

The spectacle drew a immense crowd astatine first. As the matches wore on, the crowd thinned.

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